【词汇大师】词的海洋(2/2)

英语自学网

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词典问：主人，今天你抚摸了我吗？
TIPS
本篇中，主持人的话不用听写，只听写嘉宾的话。
主持人的话：①  "Can you give us two or three examples?"
HITS
'empiricism'
quackery

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"In eighteen twenty-eight he produced a dictionary of seventy thousand words that he had been working on for well over twenty years -- actually, I think more like twenty-five years. And he did that because he felt very strongly that the country needed a dictionary to reflect the language that existed here, which was no longer exactly the same as the language that existed in the home country, or England."
"Well, I'll give you an example of a word that's changed its meaning. The word 'empiricism' meant back in Webster's time the practice of medicine without a medical education -- quackery is what it meant. 'The pretensions of an ignorant man to medical skill.' And now what we mean by empiricism is the attention to the way the world is, recording what we observe."